London, 22 May: In response to a suggestion by Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited five climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society to discuss the current state of climate science and its wider implications.

In a letter to Lord Lawson, the GWPF chairman, Sir Paul stated that the Royal Society “would be happy to put the GWPF in touch with people who can offer the Foundation informed scientific advice.”

Sir Paul suggested that the GWPF should contact five of their Fellows: Sir Brian Hoskins; Prof John Mitchell; Prof Tim Palmer; Prof John Shepherd and Prof Eric Wolff.
The GWPF has now invited the five climate scientists to a meeting with a team of members of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council and independent scientists and has proposed a two-part agenda:

1. The science of global warming, with special reference to (a) the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide and (b) the extent of natural variability;
2. The conduct and professional standards of those involved in the relevant scientific inquiry and official advisory process.

“I hope the Fellows of the Royal Society will be happy to meet with our team of scientists so that something positive can come out of Sir Paul’s recommendation,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF.

I’ll be surprised if the invitees accept this invitation. In any case the GWPF can take a bow here. They are being noticed and read by “concerned” CAGW proponents and the head of the Royal Society no less. Well done.

I watched an hour-long propaganda piece in which Nurse was the Master of Ceremony of the snarkiest caricature of legitimate scientific objections to AGW. The Royal Society is loosing ground as legitimate repository of scientific thinkers.

Look at hoe Nurse jumps to snide demagoguery in his letter.

The credentials that he insists are appropriate to legitimate a dialogue are from the brutal political anti-science, pro activist likes of the so-called Royal Society. Sir Nurse, go pound sand.

You are a henchman for the worst abusers of science in the history of mankind.

When it is all said and done we can then delete the word carbon from taxes and just say the truth about the policies being implemented because of natural climate change, Depopulation on behalf of the Oligarchy.

“Education is not a bucket that your fill…it is a fire that you light”

My science education gave me a profound respect for the English Scientific Method and it’s principle creators at the time of creation of the “Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge by Experiment”, loosely organized in 1660 and charted by the King in 1662. The fascinating, and hidden for ages, history is in the biography, “The Curious Life of Robert Hooke” by Lisa Jardine. A great biography of a decades later arrival at the RS, Isaac Newton is “Never at Rest” by Richard Westfall”.

It is indeed a travesty that the Royal Society dropped the “Natural Knowledge by Experiment” condition from their name and apparently from the scientific method. For those interested in a brief summary of the RS and it’s historic and modern distortions, there are a series of articles under the “Royal Society” at my website. It is important to review the myriad of dead ends and detours “settled science” has journeyed thru time. The current leadership of the RS is an affront to it’s founders and it’s mission. The world looks forward to their retraction and mea culpa on AGW.

Please “light your fire” and that of those around you….we have a world to educate and save.

The question to me is has Sir Paul Nurse put his head so far into the noose that he cannot prevent his hanging. I doubt that the RS can withdraw from this meeting now, and the details are being worked out by the GWPF, not the RS. It remains to be seen whether the RS can put any restrictions at all on what Benny is arranging. I presume there will be no shortage of money, so live streaming is a viable option.

There is an error in the GWPF Background Paper, para C.1 “There has been no net increase in global temperatures for about 16 years, a period about the same length as the warming period that preceded it.“. The error is in the comparison of the two periods. The 16 years of non-warming is based on how far back a trend calculation can start and not give a positive.trend. The ‘period that preceded it” is based on the point in time where the trend changed. The two cannot properly be compared.

In a letter to Lord Lawson, the GWPF chairman, Sir Paul stated that the Royal Society “would be happy to put the GWPF in touch with people who can offer the Foundation informed scientific advice.”
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That’s a loaded statement implying that GWPF needs such advice. It’s clear from the tone of the letters on both sides that this is not a meeting of friends. However, if it does go ahead it should be very interesting!

Mike Jonas says:
May 22, 2013 at 6:38 am
The two cannot properly be compared.
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true. but just such a comparison is used as the basis for AGW. by using the faulty statistics of AGW back against AGW, it demonstrates the error in the original logic. the proponents of AGW cannot argue that the statistics are faulty without ongoing their own arguments.

Bruce Cobb, you write “No meeting will ever occur, of course. The Climatists have too much to lose.”

But how much will the warmists lose if the meeting does NOT take place. If you read everything that Nurse has written to the GWPF, the RS will lose an enormous amount of credibility if they dont tell the GWPF what the “true” science is.

The people at GWPF should be very wary of arranging any meeting with fellows of the Royal Society, particularly as this seems to have been instigated by Paul Nurse. The RS have very little scientific credibility in this area IMO and their offer of providing “informed scientific advice” to the type of ‘conspiratorial climate change deniers’ recently put under the ludicrously ill-informed psychological spotlight shone by Lewandowsky – who has incidentally received a medal from the RS for his contributions to ‘research’ – is, to say the very least, open to interpretation as regards motive. Let us not also forget that the RS have, maybe still are, advocating the insane ‘solution’ of geo-engineering to ‘fix’ a climate ‘broken’ by man. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them for all their Royal patronage and long history of scientific excellence.

Can’t see it happening myself. Nurse is seemingly all mouth and no action. As per ALL the main pro-AGW protagonists they can only ‘call out’ from behind their organisations and cannot stand up in front of real scientists and be properly questioned as to their scientific reasoning. For some reason, the mere request for debate is demeaning to them – perhaps they see it as a slur on their ‘authority’ – which of course is the complete opposite of the way real, genuine and open science should be i.e. openly debated and presented.
They know they are wrong, or have got it largely wrong (take your pick) – but like all liars (or religous type zealots?) they simply refuse to listen to reason and CANNOT be seen to back down. I honestly probably wouldn’t urinate on any of them if they were on fire. They have no honour, no pride, and absolutely no respect for science whatsoever.

I think the RS reserves the right to invite who ever they seem appropriate, given that the challenge to debate has now been made by GWPF. I suggest Nurse sends an invitation to all RS members and gets someone besides himself to select the team. Call it a coalition of the willing.
Perhaps it will be the same team, perhaps not.

Many will recall the Horizon program which Paul Nurse hosted for the BBC. The title was ‘Science Under Attack’.

The program featured a senior NASA climate scientist. This scientist told an outrageous and provable lie: that human CO2 emissions are 7 times larger than natural emissions. Of course, the inconvenient truth is the opposite: natural emissions are around 30 times larger than human emissions.
Tellingly, this ‘scientist’ was using this lie to ‘prove’ the AGW theory.

The scientist stated that there was no significant peer-reviewed research that disputed AGW. He also stated that, even if the current warming was not unprecedented, the rate of warming was. That’s obviously complete nonsense. Ironically, an integral part of the CAGW doom-mongering is that there were occasions in the past when climate changed at an amazing speed, possibly in a period of a few years.

Finally, when discussing climate models, the ‘scientist’ showed an impressive video with a split screen showing the model forecast and what actually occurred. Nurse was extremely impressed. What he didn’t seem to realise was that the video lasted for just a few days. What he was showing was weather, not climate. And if you looked carefully, you could see that the video jumped regularly. It was actually looped, so the period being covered was even smaller than otherwise.

In this segment of the program Nurse came over as a gullible fool. What happened to the Royal Society’s ancient motto: “Take no one’s word for it”

If this meeting occurs, and Nurse takes part, I would strongly suggest that they recall this lie and ask Nurse for an apology. Also, I think NASA should consider taking action, if they have not already, because this scientist seriously brought NASA into disrepute. If NASA scientists can tell such obvious and provable lies, why should we believe anything they say?

There was one thing about this appalling Horizon program that was correct: its title. Yes, without question science is under attack. But it’s under attack from some climate scientists and their supporters – and the BBC. Sadly, it appears that Nurse himself is a part of this.
It’s the sceptics who are fighting for the integrity of science.
Chris

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Sir Paul Nurse is the most biased propagandist known to genuine science. He made a documentary for the BBC which was filled with the most disingenuous tripe you have ever seen. Even a five-year-old could have seen the blatant bias and disinformation.

But there again, he was prompted and paid to do this by the Biased Broadcasting Corporation, so what do you expect? Read Delingpole’s discection of Nurse’s documentary:

Delingpole quote:
“The most telling moment, however, came in an interview between Nurse and a computer-modelling scientist from Nasa, presented as a general climate expert although he is only a specialist in ice studies. Asked to quantify the relative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by human and natural causes, his seemingly devastating reply was that 7 gigatons (billion tons) are emitted each year by human activity while only 1 gigaton comes from natural sources such as the oceans. This was so much the message they wanted that Nurse invited him to confirm that human emissions are seven times greater than those from all natural sources.
This was mind-boggling. It is generally agreed that the 7 billion tonnes of CO2 due to human activity represent just over 3 per cent of the total emitted. That given off by natural sources, such as the oceans, is vastly greater than this, more than 96 per cent of the total. One may argue about the “carbon cycle” and how much CO2 the oceans and plants reabsorb. But, as baldly stated, the point was simply a grotesque misrepresentation, serving, like many of the programme’s other assertions, only to give viewers a wholly misleading impression.”

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If Sir Paul Nurse were a real man, and a real scientist, he would invite a government scientific advisor to this discussion. Someone, like …. errr ….. Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.

Now THAT would be a real discussion. But no, Nurse is a BBC acolyte and a Cooling Denier, and so he will rig the discussion in his favour. This will not be a discussion, this will be another propaganda piece for the arch-undergraduate of Goebbel’s.

Thw five fellows nominated by Nurse all rely on masive funding for their research that by and large supports AGW. Not one of them has the wider appreciation and knowledge of the climate system in time and space. They are all narrow specialists.